Much row on Mike Rowe (soft)!

They are not known to be soft operators – not even on micro scale!
Yes, you guessed it right!
Now the facts of the case as reported in News.Com

Mike Rowe, a 17-year-old student from Vancouver, British Columbia, registered Mikerowesoft.com to front his part-time Web site design business in August 2003. Three months later, he received an e-mail from Microsoft’s lawyers, asking him to transfer the domain name to Microsoft. They offered to pay him a “settlement” of $10, which is the cost of his original registration fee.

However, after the case received widespread coverage on the Internet, Microsoft acknowledged that it may have taken things too far and promised to treat Rowe fairly. A representative of the software company told ZDNet UK: “We appreciate that Mike Rowe is a young entrepreneur who came up with a creative domain name. We take our trademark seriously, but maybe a little too seriously in this case.”

Mike Rowe may have a good argument for keeping the domain name, because it is his real name, and he isn’t pretending to be affiliated with Microsoft. But he said Microsoft probably regrets getting involved with the case because of all the bad publicity it has generated.